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108 ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN'
the tour, Kilmarnock, Irvine, Kilwinning, Saltcoats, Troon, and Ayr. We must have personally distributed hundreds of the placards and seen to the actual posting of hundreds more on the boardings and on country fences and the walls of disused buildings.
The tour started on August Bank Holiday, 1898. Our company consisted of Harry Lauder, Scotland's Pride (as a little weekly paper had described me a few weeks previously), Mackenzie Murdoch, the World's Greatest Fiddler, Scott Rae, Caledonia's Popular Tenor, Flora Donaldson, Brilliant Soprano, and Howard, London's Star Ventriloquist. And though I say it myself it was a jolly fine concertparty.
Mac and I agreed to draw five pounds a week each out of the income and the salaries of the other artistes amounted, all told, to less than eight pounds a week. The tour was a ghastly failure. Night after night we played to a mere handful of people — that is, if the free passes be excepted, for there was always a good representation of dead-heads. At the end of the first week Murdoch and I were in the blues. The second and third weeks were a little better and the fourth showed a profit, encouraging me to persevere. But the last two weeks were disastrous. One night we played to thirteen grown-ups and fourteen children and of the twentyseven in the hall sixteen were there on "paper." But this wasn't the worst. At Stenhousemuir, in Stirlingshire, there were exactly eleven people in the hall and the drawings were one shilling and ninepence ! I was so enraged that after my second turn I delivered a speech, roundly rating the inhabitants for not turning up in their hundreds to hear "the finest concert -party that ever toured the British Isles." I finished up by saying that my partner, the illustrious violinist Mackenzie Murdoch and myself, Scotland's Pride, would never again set foot in that Godforsaken village. I might have said a lot more had not the village bill-poster at that